Of Hand Written Labels on Second Hand Records

July was drawing to a nondescript close. Like a short story, skimmed over after a couple of paragraphs. That the writer was famous and usually quoted to mask one's own literary shortcomings did not matter. The rain had stopped beating down an hour ago. There were little pools in the gutters which waited for the sun to liberate them at daybreak.  For now, they sat there rippling silently, reflecting the glow of speeding tail lights of tired cars.

He walked alone. Occasionally, droplets shaken off leaves by a mild but persistent wind and blown his way settled in a cool spray on his face. A movers' truck trundled by, weighed down by old teak furniture and collective sighs and memories of a family moving to a new city and a new home. The warm engine only made the late evening chill hit harder as it moved away and around the bend onto the busier roads. He hunched his shoulders up and shivered briefly and uncontrollably.

He was now walking past the rows of government housing. Identical boxes differing only in door numbers. The pavement had been pushed right to the walls of the houses in a recent road widening exercise. He passed a bathroom window with shadows playing on frosted grime coated glass slats. Someone was showering. The water gurgled down into drains in a steady flow. Steam mixed with scents of a cheap familiar soap poured out of the window lit hazily by a low wattage naked electric bulb struggling to penetrate the translucence. He walked past taking care not to stop and look through the gaps in the slats through which he could see the moldy damp roof which hadn't seen a painters brush for a long time.

He wiped the dampness off his beard with his palm and quickened his pace. A hot shower and a drink would do just fine, he thought to himself. He rarely drank alone. Today he would.Like one of those people in Hemingway's Men Without Women.But they were all better men than he ever hoped to be.

He reached the gate and fumbled in his pockets for the key. The land lady locked the gate at 11 every night. The Great Dane was loose. It was big but harmless . He never really trusted it or it him .  He tiptoed past the dog onto the stairs to his lodgings two floors above. He walked past the open bedroom window of the couple staying on the first floor.The window was open, and the curtains were flapping gently. The ceiling fan creaked familiarly. They stopped whispering when they heard his footsteps coming up and they started again as they heard them going away upwards.

After the shower, he sat by the window with a bottle of dark Caribbean rum on his teak rocking chair. Caramel infused rum. The rain had resumed when he was in the shower. Sometime later, one of the couple switched off the ceiling fan. He was not sure who, though he guessed it was the man. He seemed to have an unhealthy pallor of one who was always on the verge of catching a cold or a whichever fever was the flavour of the season. He poured some more rum into his glass.

He switched on his record player. He had picked up a scratched record in a garage sale with a red colored label on which with a fountain pen someone had carefully written "Recitations of poems of T.S.Eliot". The E in the Eliot was smudged by a drop of water, probably condensation dripping off a glass of single malt whiskey and ice or a silent tear of a once pretty woman slowly and irreversibly going to fat. An anonymous but a now familiar voice flowed out of the horn, as he gently placed the needle on the tracks. As the rough voice intoned "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock", he sat back staring into the dim streets and distant silhouettes sipping his rum. He sat there remembering the nights when one realized that it soon would be daybreak by the uncertain first light of dawn creeping in and gently outlining the contours of the fall of her back. And when she turned over, her chest gently rise, gently fall.

He fell asleep with an open bottle, a glass with dregs of the last drink and distant voices from a second hand record mingling seamlessly with more real ones from a not too far past.
 

Istanblues - Haydarpaşa version

 Haydarpaşa had been sleeping for longer than he cared to remember. It was that kind of day. He stretched on the ledge and then rubbed himself against the earthen pot of thyme. The mild fragrance of fishes and spices emanating from the pot made him purr quietly. Bayram liked his potted plants. He watered them  twice a day in summer. Once at noon, once more at nightfall. 
Once every seven sunsets Bayram walked down from Beyoğlu to the Eminönü seaside market. He always walked right down to the farthest end of the market, where the fish was freshest.  When the fish was eaten he would pour the basin of water with which he had cleaned the fishes along with the leftovers into the pots. He was always  a little partial to the thyme. 

Bayram was older than the other humans he saw every day.  He was also a lot quieter than them.  The only time he remembered him talking at a little more than a whisper was when many full moons ago, Bayram missed his visits to the Eminönü market for two full moons. Bayram lay in bed hot as a freshly baked Simit. A man in a white coat came every two sunsets to check if he had cooled down yet and gave him vile smelling syrups which Bayram steadfastly refused to drink.
It was one of those nights when Bayram had screamed as if his soul was leaving him and then for one entire day, he kept up a steady stream of loud and frantic monologue until the man in white coat put him to sleep with a mysterious needle.  
The worst part was that he, a housecat had to, for entire two full moons, scrounge in the litter bins that lined İstiklâl Street with the other destitute cats, who spoke a crude and vulgar version of the Cat tongue and had no names.  It was horrifying to have to live on what they refused to eat.  He knew better than to pick a fight with them when more than one of them sneered and hissed at him. He, who had mastered two human tongues as well as any other cat in living memory had mastered, silently glowered as he skirted their territories.
Then at night as he lay on the ledge with a barely filled stomach, he fantasized about strutting majestically with his flowing black mane into a gang of those stringy and mangy cretin  and letting them know in no uncertain terms why they would never know what it was to listen to and understand whom the humans called Johnny Cash. What it felt like to shudder everytime he heard Bayram play Folsom Prison Blues and hear the prisoners primal cheer when Cash‘s baritone rang out  “ I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” . He sometimes wondered if even Bayram understood Cash. 

Bayram’s umbrella was by the railing. He never left home without it. He probably was sitting by the window in the bedroom in his ancient rocking chair, his shaggy brows furrowed and his eyes closed. Haydarpaşa jumped down and felt his joints shudder with a dull pain as he landed on the hard stone.  He regretted not having stretched some more. It was still a few shadow lengths to sunset.  He decided to head down to the quieter stretch of sea south of the Galata Bridge though the lanes of Cihangir. He could see the lights of the Aya Sofia in the distance and the minarets of the Blue Mosque as he walked steadily downhill keeping to the lanes without cars and children. The cars could kill you and the children could do worse.

Haydarpaşa rarely made the journey to the other side of Istanbul. Eminönü was as far as he ventured on his own on most evenings he wanted to learn more words of the human tongues. Some human words were prettier than others. His favorite name was Dolores ,his favorite word was tinkle and he hated pulchritude. He remembered almost all of the days he actually did cross the Galata Bridge.

He remembered the last cold winds ,what the humans called winter (another word he liked), when the streets and rooftops had turned white, like in the fairy tales from a distant land called Simricina .Sirckeci, his uncle, had in the ancient cat tongue of Amezaara ,with an occasional cursory translation into Cimranza which cats in this part of the world spoke, in a trancelike state, described to him the mountains of Simricina on the last day of the growing moon, where the ancient cat king Izmirana went to pursue Axamandreu, the kidnapper of his beautiful salt and pepper maned Parmarin queen Elara . Haydarpaşa did not remember the words but the staccato images had stayed in his head. Amezaara had probably died with Sirckeci ,who was allegedly pushed off the Galata by a human young. Are you surprised that the Cat fairy tales are no different from the human fairy tales? I wonder why?

Coming back to the day he decided to cross the Bosphorus on one such cold day when it snowed for previous three sunsets without respite. However on this winter day, the sun was out and everything was sparkling. He had ventured into a side street with a café where humans with narrow eyes spoke in a strange tongue he failed to place. New languages were difficult to pick as one grows old. Next to the café with the strange race of people there was a hotel with two people,a man and a woman with a cigarette and a glass of tea.  He gingerly stepped into the snow and crossed the street to where they were and the woman patted his head and went inside and then in a while reappeared with a saucer of cold milk and placed it in front of Haydarpaşa. He drank it in evenly spaced slurps. A passerby waved and the woman said hello. He could see that she was just learning the language. It was thickly accented. The woman said she had to go to the Police station and patted Haydarpaşa on the head and threw her cigarette butt into the snow. The man said, she would be better off staying until the snow cleared. She said, she had made an appointment and pulled up her parka and left. Haydarpaşa quickly finished his saucerful and followed her at a safe distance. She seemed to know the place well. Haydarpaşa would have picked exactly the same turns she took to get across the bridge. She walked past the simit baker, turned at the coffee store where people were still lined up inspite of the chill, down  what seemed to be a dead end alley, went down a flight of stairs which opened into the Galata tower courtyard and then down the walkway to reach the Eminönü side of the Galata bridge. She crossed the bridge her head held close to her chest and her parka pulled close. The sun had disappeared behind a tuft of cloud and the Haydarpaşa wondered if he should turn back home. He continued to follow the woman. She crossed over to where the Spice Bazaar was and then turned up a hill skirting the main streets and turned into a street leading to the Topkapi after crossing the tramlines. A couple more turns and she stood there transfixed staring at the sky. Haydarpaşa keeping to the shadows cast by the trees and moving as only cats can move unseen was soon at the same square. In the evening sun, he saw for the first time, the snowed over dome of the Aya Sofia, bathed in a golden light . The minarets were refusing to let the snow settle on them, and at the foot of each, a mound had accumulated. The dome however, massive and gently curved, intricately textured held the snow together and the crystals refracted the evening light into splinters of color.  Axamandreu  may as well have been holding Elara hostage in one of those minarets.  She looked for a place to sit down, but did not find a bench nearby. Where she stood in the snow, a little slush pool was starting to form.  She reluctantly walked towards the Police station and then disappeared into the brick building.

Haydarpaşa waited at the square. Many people walked out, but she never did. He waited until his shadow was so long that it would soon die away. Maybe she was Elara and Axamandreu was indeed holding her inside now.

He turned around and walked back to the bridge and down to the Eminönü, where he watched the sun set behind the skyline and walked back to Beyoğlu the same way he had come earlier in the day.

But this was many moons ago. He occasionally visited the hotel next to the café, but he never saw her again. Haydarpaşa continued to walk down to the summer sea through Cihangir and then in a wide circle returned to his favorite ledge where surely Bayram had placed a saucer of milk. As he did every sunset.

Bayram was playing an old scratchy record of a man known as Chuck Berry. As he did every time he was happy.

Haydarpaşa went into room and leapt onto Bayram’s lap and purred. And as he purred he thought to himself.
Bayram has no secrets. Haydarpaşa has many.

 

Of once pretty palaces and bells that still chime

A quiet but insistent knock on the door woke him up. The ceiling fan was still creaking like a clipped metronome. The curtains were flapping soundlessly to the beat. It was an old curtain, washed many times over. The sun shone through the outlines of a faded rendering of a tiger roaring mid leap on the calico.

The knock again.

He stepped off the bed.The clock needles said 9:40 or was it 8:40. 9:40. The floor was cooler than it was yesterday. He opened the door.
"Breakfast closing at 10. You want something?", the 15 year old Marathi receptionist,concierge,cook of the Gangaram Hotel, Bhuj asked him.
"Scrambled egg and toast",he said.
"Wanting tea or coffee?"
"Tea. I know the farmers in Vidharbha are in the red, but go easy on the sugar"
"Jee sir", he smiled."Wanting hot water?, Cold day today, one bucket for twenty rupees"
"Ok.Bring it up after my breakfast is done. Will come down in a while"
"Maria madam already there", he said with a smile and walked back down to the kitchen.

Maria Joao was at the table reading the paper framed against the doorway. A gentle drizzle had started sometime not too long before.
"Good morning",she said adjusting her shawl which she had wrapped around her shoulder.
"Morning. Late start?"
"Yes. Will take it easy for the next couple of days.Plan to leave next week to the weaver village"

Maria was from Portugal. A graphic design graduate learning block printing techniques from the local artisans in the villages around Bhuj.
She spoke slowly, rolling her syllables with care.Also, she was pretty.
They had met at the dinner table the night before.An Italian photographer and a tall Dutch woman on a Sabbatical who were there for dinner were not to be seen.
They had talked of Sicily and Sicilians and how Maria's sister had wanted to marry a Sicilian she had met. In the end she decided not to, after meeting the prospective mother-in-law.
He had never been to Sicily. He wanted to go to Sicily.

"What about you?",she asked.
"Yup.Lazy weather day.Plan to go down to the Paraag Mahal a bit later in the day.
"Hmm.. was there with some friends a while ago, but the entrance charges for foreigners is outrageously expensive."
"Any good?"
"Creepy, if anything..",she said after much thought.
"We'll see..", he said, sipping the milky tea.

It was nearly two when he decided to go to the Palace complex. The hotel was right next door to the walls. The air was moist and the streets wet. Every now and then a droplet would land on the back of his neck. He followed the wall until he came to the gate.

A sign pointed to the right "For buy ticket".
A signboard said that the Palace was built in the 1879. Italian Gothic. A functional Bell tower.One of the three functional British era bell towers in the country.

All around were signs of the Great Bhuj quake, which everyone mentioned once in conversations he had had since he was here .Spidery cracks on the facade. A lopsided tower.

The palace was closed till three. The rubble from Bhuj quake had still not been cleared from the complex. It had over the course of the nine years blended into the forlorn, though not entirely depressing surroundings. Pipal trees were starting to take root among the fallen bricks. The bricks were redder than usual because of the rain. A disused well with a pulley lay to one end. A truck load of sand had been carelessly dumped nearby.
A little girl was busy tunneling into the sand with both hands. Each little hand carefully extracting a scoop of sand from either side in tandem.After every scoop she took time to smoothen the walls with her little palms. Every three or four scoops she wiped the sweat from her sandy brow.She paused for the while to check either end. Soon they would meet. She decided to take it one end at time now.

He decided to walk around until someone arrived. Soon someone arrived.
The gatekeeper.

"What time does it open?"
"Check the board. It says three"

The girl had completed her tunnel and after a pat down on the insides stood back to admire her handiwork. She was now deciding on whether to make a new tunnel to the left or the right of the current one.

"Whats inside?", he asked the gatekeeper.
"See for yourself. Just another 20mins to go".

A red sedan which had seen a brighter coat of paint rolled in. Tourists. A newly married couple got off and the man said something terse to the driver.Honeymoon.Both had their shades on. It was cloudy, so the whole world probably looked like an under-exposed photograph to them.
They came down to where he stood and asked the gatekeeper for the tickets.

"Look here.", the gatekeeper said pointing to the signboard.
The wife pulled at the husbands arm as he glared at the man through his shades. They soon found a convenient fallen pillar to take each others' pictures on, with the rubble as the backdrop. Shortly the husband walked over to him and asked if he would be "So kind as to " take their photograph.
He said yes. He took two photographs. One with the shades and one without.

They walked back together to the door. Shortly a man in an old uniform walked down to the desk at the gate with a steel box in hand.
Soon, the palace was open for business. The gatekeeper stared into the rubble with a disturbed expression for a while and then walked to the well to smoke a beedi.

The palace was as Maria had described. The corridors were wet and slippery. The couple was on their way out by the time he entered the main hall. Obviously, the decor and tenor of the place didn't go well with what they had in mind for a honeymoon. He now had the entire palace to himself.
He went into a room with a stuffed tiger whose fur was now starting to get moldy.There was one room which obviously was the bedroom with full length mirrors. The silver coating had worn off in large patches. The furnishing was distinctly European. He walked into the once definitely magnificent durbar hall. More tigers, buffaloes and antelope heads. Two buckets had been placed to catch the water leaking from a damp patch next to the crystal chandelier. Big drops sploshed into the almost full buckets every once in a while. The stained glass windows fresh after the drizzle filled the far end with dewy light. Red.Blue.Yellow.Green.

He loitered around the hall, looking for a good angle to photgraph and gave up after a few attempts. He walked up the stairway to the bell tower.The bells rang every fifteen minutes.One chime for each quarter and then ringing the number for each hour. Soon it would be four. he scrambled up the stairs to be in time. On the roof at one end was the Hamirsar and a cool breeze was blowing in from there. The tower had been hastily patched up and held rather precariously with assorted scaffolding and pillar support. He walked up the claustrophobic spiral stairway and stood above the assortment of bells, ropes and gears.
Sure enough, at four, the gongs rang out, the oiled metal and wood creaked, the ropes were pulled and with a rearrangement of gears to chime out five strokes the next hour, the tower fell silent.
He stood for a while staring into the tiled roofs of the palace watching pigeons dart in and out secret cubbyholes and cracks left open by the quake.
The sun was now out. He wondered if the tunnel still held up with the dampness fast drying away in the western Sun.

He stood there for a long time. Soon he heard footsteps. A balding head popped out of the stairway followed by a girl in her late teens in a dress she would start hating in a while. After another few minutes, a matronly woman of forty panted out of the stairway and she stood against the railing catching her breath. He walked down the stairway and went back to the entrance.

The gatekeeper was still standing by the well.
He walked down to him.
"So how long have you been working here", he asked.
He shrugged and threw his stub into the well and lit another one.
"Longer than I care to remember."
"Is the palace maintained by the ASI?"
"Nope. The trust runs it. The Maharaja's trust"
"They dont seem to be doing much from the looks of it"
"My grandfather was a halwai in the kings kitchen. He used to say that the King had an ugly queen but a lovely palace.He should have seen it now"
"Hmm... There's water leaking in the darbar hall"
"I placed the buckets myself", he said,"The present Maharaja is a mad man. Ego. Britain, France, America had all said they would pay to renovate the palace.But the man wont listen. He says, he will bring the palace to it's rightful place but not with an Englishman's money. Baawala ho gaya hai sala" ..and after a pause "Poori duniya Baawli ho gayi hai" and walked off.

He stood by the well for some time. The red walls were now glowing, the water slowly drying.
He turned to walk down back to the town.


The little girl was nowhere to be seen. All that remained were two tunnels with damp,darker sand on the entrances and a lazy dog sunning himself on the heap.
Another sedan pulled into the gates and passed him, splashing his shoes, riding over a shimmering early evening puddle.

He cursed silently and walked to the gates. "Poori duniya baawli ho gayi hai"

Scandal in the Wind

From the Political desk special correspondent

MAYAWATI GOVERNMENT INSTITUTES SALVADOR DALIT AWARD FOR STATUE MAKING

Under fire following the recent Wikileaks' release, Ms.Mayawati's government has gone on the offensive to reverse adverse public opinion with a slew of measures. The Wikileaks report had accused Ms.Mayawati of, among other things, being MAYAWATI.

The Uttar Pradesh State government has announced the institution of the Salvador Dalit Award for excellence in the field of sculpture and iconography. The awards will be judged by an eminent panel headed by Ms.Mayawati. It is expected to be a single person panel.
The award will be given out every year on the occasion of Ms.Mayawati's birthday to the best Mayawati statue sculpture and will include a free trip in a empty jet to a choice of location of Ms.Mayawati's rally in the past one month.

Addressing a rally of 100000 strong people patiently waiting in the dusty heat of the Cow belt for their promised biryani, 500ml desi and a Maya themed Barbie doll, Ms.Mayawati stated that the move will galvanise, what is arguably, the state's biggest industry and benefit the poorest of the poor.
The announcement has also resulted in the increase in the stock prices of the Reliance Industries, who had acquired the biggest marble quarries in the neighbouring Madhya Pradesh just days before Ms.Mayawati's institution of the award. Company spokesperson denied any links between the two events and the same evening issued a denial for the denial to keep all bases covered just in case.

In the press conference following the rally, when one of the press corps indicated that she was obviously misappropriating the name of the famous European artist, she promptly accused him of being anti dalit and said that like Salvador Dali, she was widely misunderstood and misrepresented

Her suave aide-de-camp Satish Mishra, then disconnected his call to the US Ambassador's residence and interjected that, like Dali, Ms.Mayawati shared a Surrealist view of the world. He also reiterated that he had been misquoted in the Wikileaks report and said that all he said was that Ms.Mayawati had a “strong, authoritarian steak” sent to her by the Texas chapter of the BSP(TBSP, often mistaken for Tablespoon in party literature) on the occasion of her birthday.

Ms.Mayawati's birthday is in addition to being a significant social event in the UP Administrative services calendar is also a very important source of income for Lucknow's bakery industry. The economic churn associated with the event is no less significant in comparison to what is experienced in New Orleans during the Mardi Gras or Rio during the Carnival weekend. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Ms.Mayawati on her birthday means business when she says “..let them have cake”.

At the end of the conference, she released an audio CD compilation of songs sung by leading artists of the day,from around the world, in her praise. The album features Elton John's rendition of "Scandal in the Wind", Chantal Kreviazuk's “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and Bappi Lahiri's remixed version of “Blue Suede Shoes”.

Party insiders indicate that Ms.Mayawati had stridently demanded that the famously dead Michael Jackson be convinced into contributing to the album. After, much grovelling and convincing on the impossibility of the situation, she grudging accepted that he would be unavailable, but not before accusing him of being obviously anti-Dalit for not being a part of the historic compilation.

Salvador Dali, for obvious reasons was unavailable for comment.

People from The Mountains -1- One Fine Day

He was sitting on the top of a bus when he first saw her. He saw her before she saw him. She was with a companion. A tall brunette. You could say, they had just met on the road. Both seemed to be people who would pack and unpack their backpacks a few times before they decide to stuff everything in anyways.

She saw him as she stood trying to figure which of the many old green and white buses she had to take to go over the mountains, over the Rohtang. She was not too sure she wanted to be travelling on top of any of them and walked towards the far end with the brunette trailing slightly behind.

The morning mountain air was crisp. The bus stand had been washed clean by the early morning showers. Little puddles with little ripples as the buses trundled past, engines struggling to breathe in the thin air. The man next to him tried to light a beedi. Two match sticks, the wind blew out before the end glowed a bright orange as the man drew in a deep drag. A couple, possibly Israeli with Star of David tattoos and dreadlocks looked like they had smoked something stronger than just a beedi.

A sharp rasping voice from below cut in. "Uthro saalon!! This bus not moving if people on top sitting. Bus company very strict. Sometime people falling into mountainside and dying."
The conductor went into the bus having made what he thought was a fairly impressive speech... in English.
No one moved. Ten minutes, the world went around it's axis, slowly , thoughtfully.

The sharp rasping voice started again."What I tell..". Only to be cut off by the earthy pahaadi accented Hindi speaking driver who sauntered in from the chai shop with his still steaming glass of chai. His voice had the same quality as the vapour strongly rising from his glass.
"A man died a month ago. Left behind a woman and a few kids. The driver and conductor are in jail now.If you dont get off. This doesn't move. ", he said pointing his tea glass at the bus. The steam silently melting into the morning chill against a dusty bright movie poster.
The driver then pointed his tea glass hand at him and said. "Tell the bloody phirangis what I just said .All of you get down and wait for the next one coming in from Rekong Peo".
Everyone climbed down in a few minutes. Some more reluctant than others.

The bus from Rekong Peo silently slid into the other end of the bus stand as everyone was getting off this bus and before he was able to get in, it was full. He threw his backpack on the roof in between a bunch of vegetable sacks and got into the already full bus.

She was there in the last seat by the door and a dirty window. He climbed in. People walked in. He let them past leaning against a cold steel pillar by the door. The floor of the bus was muddy.

The conductor walked up to him.
"How long to Keylong?", he inquired.
"The road is quite bad, just a slush stream at places on the top.Should be about 8 hours tops"
"How much?"
"8 hours I said"
"No. I was asking about the ticket."
"120"
"Here you go. Standing is not fun"
"Hope your back holds up. You city folk", he said and walked down to the brunette.

"Two tickets to Keylong"
The brunette said something into her ear. She replied.In French. She had a lilting faraway tone. She shuffled for a while, opening her passport pouch and then her wallet before putting together her 120 for her ticket.She smiled sometimes into a distant void as she talked.
The bus weaved its way out of the town. Slowly at first. Slower still later. Little pockets of conversations had started in the meanwhile. A vegetable seller introducing himself to a Slovenian father and son. The Israelis quietly whispering to themselves. An old man complaining to his neighbour about the Israelis. A quiet looking short man was asking a tall Dutch lady if she would marry him.
He stood against the pillar for a while. Every time the tyres drowned into a pot hole of indeterminate depth, the passengers at the back were tossed up like vegetables being tossed for a salad by a careless tired chef.

One hour.They were climbing now. Someone pointed to a carcass of a jeep fallen off a cliff and everyone craned their necks ..some ...only because the neighbour was craning his neck.
She woke up the brunette, who had dozed off and pointed wordlessly to the jeep.
The brunette said something. She said nothing. The brunette dozed off again.

The road was better now and they were making good time.
One hour.Still climbing. The honking was conspicuous by it's absence.

He had just found the sweet spot against the pillar he had now warmed up and that was when the brakes slammed. Someone swore. He was sprawled against the door before he knew what had happened. Almost at her feet.
The driver was leaning outside the window and questioning the parentage of a jeep driver coming downhill. The jeep driver was responding in kind . He stood up righting himself. He felt a vague dull pain in his shoulder where he had landed against the door.

"Are you alright?". The same distant lilting tone.
"Yup. The road is..ummm.. quite bad". he said in an asphyxiated voice of someone who was waiting to talk to someone with a opening line in mind, but had to change it suddenly on being spoken to.
He certainly didn't sound anything like he had wanted to sound with the opening line.
She smiled brightly and looked away as you would look away from someone you wanted to make conversation to , but just figured that the other person probably didn't.
He wanted to tell her, that it wasn't that way. He didn't. He couldn't.

He sat on the floor by the doorway. The wind had dried the sludge into little misshapen crumble cookies. He felt them crumble as he sat on them.
The bus was now behind an army convoy. It sure seemed that it would be there for a while as the road had now dramatically narrowed.
The bus stopped. The whole world as far as he could see had stopped.

"Landslide". Someone said.
Slowly people started getting off. The old man, went to the rock scree behind a boulder after much looking about. He came back his fly still undone.
The Israelis, got down to smoke.
She fumbled into her pack and came up with a crumpled cardigan, careful not to disturb the sleeping brunette, contorting herself in the little space she had to put it on. He was sure that they had just met on the road.
He got down to stretch his legs. His shoulder was a bit numb too. He jumped across the slush missing his target and splashing into the muck. The mountains are never a bad place to get stuck in he thought as he took in the view of the valley in mid summer.

The greenest it would be any time of the year. Glacier melt slowly pushing it's way down the valleys. Stopping to pass on a secret package to the trees it happened to meet along the way. The trees would then blow up the bounty in a brief shriek of joy..A joy, green in colour. Only to slowly wither away leaf by leaf in the not too far winter. He vaguely pointed his camera to capture the valley mid-shriek.

She had gotten off the bus too. She walked across . Uphill of where he was.
He asked the driver who was squatting by the slush on the side of the road how long they would be here.
The driver shrugged and asked if he had a cigarette.
He said he didnt . The driver shrugged some more.
She took out a pack of almonds . She ate them staring into a valley with defocussed eyes.

She had pretty hands.
What makes some hands prettier than others?

He continued to stare at her hands as she stared into the valley. Keeping time by the delightful arc of her hand as it moved from somewhere in her lap to her slightly chaffed wind blown lips.

The crowds were now starting to head back to their buses. The rubble had been cleared.
The Israelis had just lit a cigarette. One of them looked peeved that he had to waste a perfectly good stick because someone cleared the rubble a bit too early. He seemed to be a someone who thought the whole damn world was unfair anyways. He was the last to get in.
He let the guy past as he stood against his once warm,now cold steel pillar.

The brunette was up now and was trying to take some pictures of the valley and the mountains on the other side placing the camera unsteadily in front of her nose as the bus swayed.
Soon, they were at the top. It was a time somewhere between early evening and late afternoon and now the bus started to go downhill trying not to careen into the valley and join a few other unlucky brethren rusting in the scree far below.
Everyone had their cameras out. The Japanese far in the front respectfully poking their long lenses past their neighbours noses apologising every time they fell against them when the bus braked.
Had had his out too. The brunette was sleeping again. He was busy for a bit trying to adjust his light meter settings every time the bus went in and out of shadows of the mountains .

Their eyes met. She half smiled.
He was not sure if she had smiled. He smiled and looked away not sure why he did that .
When he next turned to her with a rehearsed opening line,she had already closed her eyes, her fingers gripping the window pane pretending to be asleep
The evening light was settling softly across her tightly stretched face.
Yes.She was pretending to be asleep.
As the bus turned a bend , he saw her hand, still gripping the dirty pane. One brightly painted red nail glowing in the warm light.
One glowing red nail, framed against the mountains. Like a wayward sun who had lost his way across the sky. He could see her fingers tighten and relax as the bus banked around bends, but her eyes remained shut. Her face remained taut.
He closed his eyes too. Letting the sunlight warm his eyelids. He found the sweet spot on his warm pillar again to rest his back on. And watched floating tendrils in a red sea through his closed eyes.

"Bon Jour", he would say when she opened her eyes.
"Bon Jour", she would say with a smile . Adding. "Parlez vous Français ?!"
"Nope. Nothing beyond 'Ça Va'. Ça Va?"
"Hehe. Am fine. Where you from by the way"
"From the south. Somewhere warmer. And you"
"From Paris.I've never been to the south of India. I'd like to though."
"You should. It's pretty in parts, ugly in parts, interesting in most parts."
"One can say that about most places in the world. Dont you think so?"
"Nope. Wouldn't say that about Paris."
"You've been there?"
"Yes and no."
"And that means?"
"Was there for only a weekend? Almost doesn't count considering Paris"
"You liked it?"
"Hemingway didn't lie, when he said that Paris is a movable feast...Ugly was sure missing there"
"A movable feast....."
"Ya. Difficult to explain it without spoiling the orange tinted connotations that the phrase puts in your head"
"I kinda get what you say. I would say 'Yes' if someone asked me if Paris was a movable feast too I guess"
"You read Hemingway?"
"One"
"Which one?"
"Something about a civil war in Spain"
"For whom the bell tolls?"
"Yup. The same one"
"It's like listening to the Blues isnt it ? Reading Hemingway.",he said.
She mulled over that for a moment.
"Not a bad way to put it. Though I look at it like watching people at the Notre Dame on a bright Summer day."
He mulled over it for a moment.
" Not a bad way to put it either", he smiled into her eyes.
"You have pretty hands"
"Really", she said looking at them,"Nobody told me that"
"Now someone did"
"I'll remember that" .She laughed from into his eyes.
"Not a bad day at all isn't it?"
"A fine day, monsieur. A fine day" ,she said looking into the distant mountains. "It isnt the same as Not a Bad day"
"A fine day it is , mmeslle"

The light was already fading as the bus made its way down the last stretch.

The damn brakes again.
They both woke up with a jolt.

Their eyes met again.
He half smiled at her. "Bon Jour", he said gingerly.
"Bon jour" , she said, not exactly like she had said a while ago when both where floating down the mountainside in the warm light with the bright nail framed against the evening mountains.Eyes closed.

She had gone from pretending to be asleep to a point in space-time she may not have been awake, somewhere during the descent.
She looked at him and started to say something.

She took a little too long.

He had already decided that it was probably not the right thing to have said. Should he have said "Bon Soir"? He looked away into the mountains.
He looked up. He saw her eyes closed. The window closed . Eyes shut.Hands pulled into her crumpled cardigan. Face taut.
He smiled into the evening and waited for Keylong to arrive listening to Norwegian Wood looping over and over again in his earphones.

"It was not a bad day". He thought.
"It could have been a fine day", he sighed and walked off the bus to find a place to stay for the night.

Of Moments of Truth

Railway stations had always fascinated him. This one was vaguely similar to an old picture he had filed away someplace . The picture in his head was too clear to be true. He smiled at the thought of how much of our past is imagined and how much is what we want it to be , rather than what it really was.
His train of thought was broken by the footsteps of a dozen dhoti clad passengers running on to the rusty metal over-bridge to go over to the next platform, mouthing a very rural Telugu in between paan tinged breaths.
The evening sun, had just gone below the horizon. A slight chill hung in the air. It was a window between when he could see the mynas silhouetted against a shade of an indigo sky, with a tinge of orange and the time the antiseptic white street lights are switched on.
The mynas were as he had imagined them in his filed away picture.Equidistantly perched over the electric lines with millimetric accuracy.

The crowd thickened steadily and he instinctively tightened his grip on his backpack. He had an hours time to kill and he walked the entire platform searching for a suitable bench to settle on. All of them were full.. With families excited to be going away on a holiday, with daily labourers and their dazed looks, with a newly married couple thrilled to be holding hands and making plans.

After he had walked back and forth a couple of times, he found on bench with a red veil limply across it. It was probably left unoccupied, because of the veil.. It almost told you with a quiet dignity to find another bench..this one is taken.. He pushed it one corner of the bench and settled in for a long wait for his train to arrive. He didnt mind the wait. He could see in the fading light, the wisdom and the quiet fortitude of the elderly, the burden of responsibility,the ebullience of youth, the joy of childhood. He was completely at peace. He liked the fuzzy feeling of the nothingness and disconnected thought. Miles way from the life of constant confusion that he was going back to.

A feeble voice, yet so clearly heard over the din, reached him. It was an elderly man, dressed in clothes that looked like they had been washed many times over and yet looked neat. He held in his hand a leather case ,that had seen better days. The bag was packed completely and the zipper had popped at the seams. The man asked him, if there were any ladies sitting next to him. When he answered in the negative, the old man picked up the veil and with a tired sigh, he moved it aside to make room,taking care not to drop it onto the dusty floor.

Both stared at the mynas until they were imagining them against the pitch darkness on the horizon.

The crowd was by now jostling around with people tracing random traverses to get from one place to another. He nervously asked the man,where the B2 wagon would stop on the platform.

The old man indicted that it would be stopping just about a few metres from their bench. He relaxed.

The old man asked him, where he was going to. He replied that he was going to Bangalore. The old man, throttled half a chuckle.

" Software?"

"No, Electronics"

"Ah, Ok, Software". A quiet,uneasy silence.

"You are going to Bangalore too?"

"No. I am going to a small town called Chittoor. It's close to Tirupati, about 50 km from the Karnataka border.",he said in fairly good Kannada.

"Oh, you speak Kannada!",he exclaimed, decidedly surprised to hear his native tongue,so far from home.

"Yes, I worked in Bellary for some time. I learnt my Kannada there. Are you here on a vacation?"

"Hmm. Had come over to meet my grandparents, who live close to here. What about you?"

"I am on my way back home from Behrampur, travelling in the general compartment"

"Oh.Orissa?"

"Yes, my son works in the Archaelogical Survey of India, as a junior assistant. He has just been posted there and it is the first time, he has been away from home for so long. I went to visit him for a couple of days to make sure he is alright"

"Oh,that's nice"

"I am a school headmaster in a government school in Chittoor" , "just three months way from retirement",he added with a twinge.

"Must have been difficult travelling in the general compartment."

"We are used to this. We have to learn to."

He imagined the headmaster's son, brought up on a dosage of middle class values. middle class resilience, conservative sheltered thought, poring over dig sites, finding stuff that people world over would come to see and could not help comparing it with his own job of pecking away mindlessly at a keyboard. The confusion, which had cleared amidst the throngs of the humanity just moments ago, was slowly seeping back into the crevices of his psyche.

He felt guilty about earning all that money for a little more than breaking a mild mental sweat in a shiny cubicle in an environment where people complained if the AC setting was 2DegC above or below their liking.

More than ever, he resolved to end up doing what he wanted to do. Get back to the classroom,only this time, on the otherside of the desks within the next few years...
His guilt trips were using up more fuel than ever before off late.

He shook his head and said,

"It's such an interesting job, is'nt it? The ASI "

"A job is a job. He found it after a lot of running around. I spent a lot of my savings to get him this job. It doesnt pay much, but he atleast can do something with his life. "

He tried hard to find the right thing to say. He couldnt find anything much to say and smiled meekly.

"Must be hot in Chittoor"

"Much hotter than Bangalore definitely"

Weather. Signs that the conversation was wearing thin.

He left the old man to his thoughts. The old man wiped his glasses.
A mother shouted at her 5 year old. An old woman carefully adjusted her sari before descending into the tracks to cross over to the other platform.

His train was due in a couple of minutes. Already people on the platform were restlessly stirring, counting their baggage and in some cases their children. A kilometre down the line, where the tracks bends into the paddy fields, a strident beam appeared and was soon followed by a strident hoot of the engine's whistle. He got up and stretched.

He looked down to the old man still staring into a private void.
"The train is here"

"I have a small request if you will care to hear"
"Yes"
"I dont have money for a ticket or food. My wallet was stolen on my way here from Behrampur"
"Ok...",he said hesitantly. The engine hooted out a clear and shrill note.
"If you dont mind, can you lend me 200 Rs? Give me your address and I will send you the money. I dont know anyone in this town and you know how the Ticket Checker is"

The train was now almost at the platform, sending people instinctively behind the yellow line which they normally ignore.

His mind was racing. It was not the 200Rs that worried him. He wondered about many things, like trust, fate, belief all at once. The train stopping and all the people rushing in did not help him.

He took out 200Rs and hurriedly wrote down his address on the paper the man had held out to him.
The man thanked him tersely and walked away.

The train stopped here for only two minutes, a punctuation in its journey across the fertile south. He had to get into the train now. He went in and sat at his window seat pushing his cheeks against the cold,rusty grills. He saw the man... or was it someone else headed towards the station exit.

Something told him, sitting on the cold rexin of the Indian Railways berth... all the "life experience" he thought he had earned over the years of travelling and meeting strange people in strange lands, had not helped him when he was getting conned in a place 50km from where he was born.

But somewhere there was a niggling hope that a cheque would be mailed to him. Like in a Reader's Digest story.

Three and a half years hence, recalling the incident and updating a blog post .. it still rankled. The old man needed the 200 more than he did, no question about that.. He spent more getting his hair trimmed.

Still.. the fact that the letter never came dented his faith in more ways that one.

The old man probably still comes to the same station every once in a while, fine tuning his act, adding minute details to make his son. his job and his retirement vivid entities with a life of their own...A sharpened pencil and a piece of paper ready in hand.

Slip Sliding Away

She walked in somewhere between the time he ordered for his fourth cup of kahwa and the time the cocoon warehouse caught fire caught fire in Kawabata's Snow Country.

She walked in with the afternoon melting fretfully into evening...an evening which made it easy for one to make a choice between the cane outdoor chairs or the air conditioned couches inside the cafe with the artificial lights and the still cinnamon laden heavy air. He never like cinnamon all that much anyways.

It must have been the glasses. What about her glasses? He wasn't quite sure.But yeah..must have been the glasses.

The cafe overlooked a wide street across which was a grey ash brick wall. Inside the grey ash brick wall was a grey ash brick one room house . A dog wrestled a cock into the ground .The cock in turn tried to peck the mongrel when it had a chance to get up and noisily flap its wings into a little private dust storm.

She chose a chair overlooking the entrance, across his table, partially hidden behind a rather inconveniently located pillar.

His kahwa arrived. She beckoned to the waiter. She didn't look like a coffee person. Must have been the glasses. What about her glasses? She didn't take too long to place her order. She was possibly a regular here? Quite unlikely though as this was a new cafe and he was here most weekends since it opened and had never seen her.

A brisk breeze not quite a wind, was blowing. Monsoons had hit the Andamans already.. the confident looking, business suited newsreader had said and was fast progressing towards the mainland.The dusty leaves swaying with a practiced carelessness cast moving rusty shadows on the walls of the cafe. Filtered sunlight.

A Mango smoothie arrived at her table. Yup. Not a coffee person. She opened a book,tweaked the straw at the bend into a convenient angle, pushed up the bridge of her glasses, drew a sharp sip from the glass and proceeded to read.He tried to read the title on the red colored cover. The pillar was definitely inconveniently located.

More people were walking into the cafe. Some of them still numb mouthed from a comfortable afternoon siesta in a shaded dark curtained neighborliness with the ceiling fan creaking randomly rhythmic overhead. The curtains occasionally forced astray to cast shards of bright light.

The book she was reading was fairly thick. His Tolkien in his bookshelf didn't look too dissimilar. Was she a Tolkien reader? He remembered a random conversation he had with a friend some years ago about women who knew their Simon and Garfunkel and what defines them.Very few women he knew ,knew their Simon and Garfunkel. He met one on a beach on the West coast on a rainy weekend ..but he didn't know then that she knew her Simon and Garfunkel. She was a something in the media business..he couldn't quite remember now.. and had a little gap between her two front teeth and her name reminded him of snow in a teacup.

His tea was now cold. He didn't particularly mind that .The shadows were getting longer, the streets busier. Each table had a little plot unfolding. Some more interesting than others.

She seemed to be a slow and a thorough reader.Unlike him. She took her time stopping occasionally to stare vacantly into the street. Which Tolkien was her favorite? What did she think of the movie? He wagered that she too would have thought that the movie never did justice to the book. He was right about the coffee,wasn't he? A phone call interrupted her. She disposed of it quickly with a series of shrugs and a none too cheerful goodbye.

He walked down to the restroom . She looked up as he went past and their gazes met. Before either could register much he walked past. What about those glasses? By the looks of it..She hadn't started reading the book too long ago.

On his way back, he caught her mid sip staring into the vacantness ahead and he could read the title lit in a shaft of light.

“Word Power Made Easy”.The same book thats been crowding the pavements of the cities of the country for the last decade along with babble like “Who moved my Cheese?”

It was like someone switched on a fluorescent industrial tube light in a cozy candle lit room ,switching off the BB King record playing in the background at the same time.

He got back to his table. A stray dusty leaf had found its way into his tea cup in the meanwhile. And he was no longer sure when he claimed in conversations that life had taught him how not to be judgmental.

Wry smile.

He closed the Kawabata, put it into his backpack,paid the bill at the the counter and cycled home humming “Slip Sliding Away”...Damn.What about those glasses?